Misdirected Violence

My information diet is, like most others, self-curated and biased. As a result, the news that finally makes its way through my filters (meaning that to which I give any attention) is incomplete. This I admit without reservation. However, it’s not only my filters at work. Nearly everyone with something to say, reveal, or withhold regarding civil unrest sparked in the U.S. and diffusing globally has an agenda. Here are some of the things we’re not hearing about but should expect to:

• comparison of peaceful protest to violent protest, by percentage, say, at least until the police show up and things go sideways
• incidence of aldermen, councilmen, mayors, congressmen, and other elected officials who side with protesters
• incidence of police officers who side with protesters, take a knee, and decline to crack heads
• examples of police units on the streets who do not look like they’re equipped like soldiers in a war zone — deployed against civilians with bottles and bricks (mostly)
• incidents where it’s police rioting rather than protesters
• situations where looters are left alone to loot while nearby protesters are harassed and arrested or worse

If the objective of those trying to control the narrative, meaning the MSM, the corpocracy, and municipal, state, and Federal PR offices, is to strike fear in the hearts of Americans as a means of rationalizing and justifying overweening use of state power (authoritarianism), then it makes sense to omit or de-emphasize evidence that protesters are acting on legitimate grievances. Indeed, if other legitimate avenues of petitioning government — you know, 1st Amendment stuff — have been thwarted, then it should be expected that massed citizen dissent might devolve into violence. Group psychology essentially guarantees it.

Such violence may well be misdirected, but that violence is being reflected back at protesters in what can only be described as further cycles of escalation. Misdirection upon misdirection. That is not at all the proper role of civil authority, yet the police have been cast in that role and have been largely compliant. Dystopian fiction in the middle of the 20th century predicted this state of human affairs pretty comprehensively, yet we find ourselves having avoided none of it.

Channeling Contagion

Caveat: rather overlong for me, but I got rolling …

One of the better articles I’ve read about the pandemic is this one by Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate (a publication I’ve never heard of before). It reads as only slightly conspiratorial, purporting to reveal the true motivation for lockdowns and social distancing, namely, so-called herd immunity. If that’s the case, it’s basically a silent admission that no cure, vaccine, or inoculation is forthcoming and the spread of the virus can only be managed modestly until it has essentially raced through the population. Of course, the virus cannot be allowed to simply run its course unimpeded, but available impediments are limited. “Flattening the curve,” or distributing the infection and death rates over time, is the only attainable strategy and objective.

Wedding mathematical and biological insights, as well as the law of mass action in chemistry, into an epidemic model may seem obvious now, but it was novel roughly a century ago. We’re also now inclined, if scientifically oriented and informed, to understand the problem and its potential solutions management in terms of engineering rather than medicine (or maybe in terms of triage and palliation). Global response has also made the pandemic into a political issue as governments obfuscate and conceal true motivations behind their handling (bumbling in the U.S.) of the pandemic. Curiously, the article also mentions financial contagion, which is shaping up to be worse in both severity and duration than the viral pandemic itself.

Everything and Nothing

In the introduction to an article at TomDispatch about anticipated resumption of professional sports currently on hiatus like much of the rest of human activity (economic and otherwise), Tom Engelhardt recalls that to his childhood self, professional sports meant so much and yet so little (alternatively, everything and nothing). This charming aspect of the innocence of childhood continues into adulthood, whether as spectator or participant, as leisure and freedom from threat allow. The article goes on to offer conjecture regarding the effect of reopening professional sports on the fall presidential election. Ugh! Racehorse politics never go out of season. I reject such purely hypothetical analyses, which isn’t the same as not caring about the election. Maybe I’ll wade in after a Democratic nominee is chosen to say that third-party candidates may well have a much larger role to play this time round because we’re again being offered flatly unacceptable options within the two-party single-party system. Until then, phooey on campaign season!

Still, Engelhardt’s remark put me in mind of a blog post I considered fully nine years ago but never got around to writing, namely, how music functions as meaningless abstraction. Pick you passion, I suppose: sports, music (any genre), literature, painting, poetry, dance, cinema and TV, fashion, fitness, nature, house pets, house plants, etc. Inspiration and devotion come in lots of forms, few of which are essential (primary or ontological needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy) yet remain fundamental to who we are and what we want out of life. Accordingly, when one’s passion is stripped away, being left grasping and rootless is quite common. That’s not equivalent to losing a job or loved one (those losses are afflicting many people right now, too), but our shared experience these days with no bars, no restaurants, no sports, no concerts, no school, and no church all add up to no society. We’re atomized, unable to connect and socialize meaningfully, digital substitutes notwithstanding. If a spectator, maybe one goes in search of replacements, which is awfully cold comfort. If a participant, one’s identity is wrapped up in such endeavors; resulting loss of meaning and/or purpose can be devastating.

It would be easy to over-analyze and over-intellectualize what meaningless abstraction means. It’s a trap, so I’ll do my best not to over-indulge. Still, it’s worth observing that as passions are habituated and internalized, their mode of appreciation is transferred from the senses (or sensorium) to the mind or head (as observed here). Coarseness and ugliness are then easily digested, rationalized, and embraced instead of being repulsive as they should be. There’s the paradox: as we grow more “sophisticated” (scare quotes intentional), we also invert and become more base. How else to explain tolerance of increasingly brazen dysfunction, corruption, servitude (e.g., debt), and gaslighting? It also explains the attraction to entertainments such as combat sports (and thug sports such as football and hockey), violent films, professional wrestling (more theater than sport), and online trolling. An instinctual blood lust that accompanies being predators, if not expressed more directly in war, torture, crime, and self-destruction, is sublimated into entertainment. Maybe that’s an escape valve so pressures don’t build up any worse, but that possibility strikes me as rather weak considering just how much damage has already been done.

Fiction Intrudes on Reality

Purpose behind consumption of different genres of fiction varies. For most of us, it’s about responding to stimuli and experiencing emotions vicariously, which is to say, safely. For instance, tragedy and horror can be enjoyed, if that’s the right word, in a fictional context to tweak one’s sensibilities without significant effect outside the story frame. Similarly, fighting crime, prosecuting war, or repelling an alien invasion in a video game can be fun but is far removed from actually doing those things in real life (not fun). For less explicitly narrative forms, such as music, feelings evoked are aesthetic and artistic in nature, which makes a sad song or tragic symphony enjoyable on its own merits without bleeding far into real sadness or tragedy. Cinema (now blurred with broadcast TV and streaming services) is the preeminent storytelling medium that provoke all manner of emotional response. After reaching a certain age (middle to late teens), emotional detachment from depiction of sexuality and violent mayhem makes possible digestion of such stimulation for the purpose of entertainment — except in cases where prior personal trauma is triggered. Before that age, nightmare-prone children are prohibited.

Dramatic conflict is central to driving plot and story forward, and naturally, folks are drawn to some stories while avoiding others. Although I’m detached enough not to be upset by, say, zombie films where people and zombies alike are dispatched horrifically, I wouldn’t say I enjoy gore or splatter. Similarly, realistic portrayals of war (e.g., Saving Private Ryan) are not especially enjoyable for me despite the larger story, whether based on true events or entirely made up. The primary reason I leave behind a movie or TV show partway through is because I simply don’t enjoy watching suffering.

Another category bugs me even more: when fiction intrudes on reality to remind me too clearly of actual horrors (or is it the reverse: reality intruding on fiction?). It doesn’t happen often. One of the first instances I recall was in Star Trek: The Next Generation when the story observed that (fictional) warp travel produced some sort of residue akin to pollution. The reminder that we humans are destroying the actual environment registered heavily on me and ruined my enjoyment of the fictional story. (I also much prefer the exploration and discovery aspects of Star Trek that hew closer to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision than the militaristic approach now central to Star Trek.) A much more recent intrusion occurs in the rather adolescent TV show The 100, where a global nuclear exchange launched by an artificial intelligence has the follow-on effect a century later of remaining nuclear sites going critical, melting down, and irradiating the Earth, making it uninhabitable. This bothers me because that’s my expectation what happens in reality, probably not too long (decades) after industrial civilization collapses and most or all of us are dead. This prospect served up as fiction is simply too close to reality for me to enjoy vicariously.

Another example of fiction intruding too heavily on my doomer appreciation of reality occurred retroactively. As high-concept science fiction, I especially enjoyed the first Matrix movie. Like Star Trek, the sequels degraded into run-of-the-mill war stories. But what was provocative about the original was the matrix itself: a computer-generated fiction situated within a larger reality. Inside the matrix was pleasant enough (though not without conflict), but reality outside the matrix was truly awful. It was a supremely interesting narrative and thought experiment when it came out in 1999. Now twenty-one years later, it’s increasingly clear that we are living in a matrix-like, narrative-driven hyperreality intent on deluding ourselves of a pleasant equilibrium that simply isn’t in evidence. In fact, as societies and as a civilization, we’re careening out of control, no brakes, no steering. Caitlin Johnstone explores this startling after-the-fact realization in an article at Medium.com, which I found only a couple days ago. Reality is in fact far worse than the constructed hyperreality. No wonder no one wants to look at it.

God’s Eye View (redux)

The first time I wrote on this title was here. I’m pretty satisfied with that 11-year-old blog post. Only recently, I copped to use of reframing to either zoom in on detail or zoom out to context, a familiar rhetorical device. Here I’m zooming out again to the god’s eye view of things.

The launching point for me is James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post explaining and apologizing for his generation’s principal error: financialization of the U.S. economy. In that post, he identifies characteristics in grandparents and parents of boomers as each responds and adapts to difficulties of the most self-destructive century in human history. Things destroyed include more than just lives, livelihoods, and the biosphere. After several centuries of rising expectations and faith in progress (or simply religious faith), perhaps the most telling destruction is morale, first in the reckless waste of WWI (the first mechanized war), then repeatedly in serial economic and political catastrophes and wars that litter the historical record right up to today. So it’s unsurprising (but not excusable) that boomers, seeing in unavoidable long-term destruction our powerlessness to master ourselves or in fact much of anything — despite the paradox of developing and obtaining more power at every opportunity — embarked on a project to gather to themselves as much short-term wealth and power as possible because, well, why the fuck not? Kunstler’s blog post is good, and he admits that although the masters-of-the-universe financial wizards who converted the economy into a rigged casino/carnival game for their own benefit are all boomers, not all boomers are responsible except in the passive sense that we (includes me, though I’m just as powerless as the next) have allowed it to transpire without the necessary corrective: revolt.

Zooming out, however, I’m reminded of Jared Diamond’s assessment that the greatest mistake humans ever committed was the Agricultural Revolution 10–13 millennia ago. That context might be too wide, so let me restrict to the last 500 years. One theory propounded by Morris Berman in his book Why America Failed (2011) is that after the discovery of the New World, the cohort most involved in colonizing North America was those most desperate and thus inclined to accept largely unknown risks. To them, the lack of ontological security and contingent nature of their own lives were undeniable truths that in turn drive distortion of the human psyche. Thus, American history and character are full of abominations hardly compensated for by parallel glories. Are boomers, or more generally Americans, really any worse than others throughout history? Probably not. Too many counter-examples to cite.

The current endgame phase of history is difficult to assess as we experience it. However, a curious theory came to my attention that fits well with my observation of a fundamental epistemological crisis that has made human cognition into a hall of mirrors. (See also here and here, and I admit cognition may have always been a self-deception.) In a recent Joe Rogan podcast, Eric Weinstein, who comes across as equally brilliant and disturbed (admitting that not much may separate those two categories), opines that humans can handle only 3–4 layers of deception before collapsing into disorientation. It’s probably a feature, not a bug, and many have learned to exploit it. The example Weinstein discusses (derivative of others’ analyses, I think) is professional wrestling. Fans and critics knew for a very long time that wrestling looks fake, yet until the late 1980s, wrestlers and promoters held fast to the façade that wresting matches are real sporting competitions rather than being “sports entertainments.” Once the jig was up, it turned out that fans didn’t really care; it was real enough for them. Now we’ve come full circle with arguments (and the term kayfabe) that although matches are staged and outcomes known in advance, the wresting itself is absolutely for real. So we encounter a paradox where what we’re told and shown is real, except that it isn’t, except that it sorta is, ultimately finding that it’s turtles all the way down. Enthusiastic, even rabid, embrace of the unreality of things is now a prime feature of the way we conduct ourselves.

Professional wrestling was not the first organization or endeavor to offer this style of mind-bending unreality. Deception and disinformation (e.g., magic shows, fortune-telling, con jobs, psyops) have been around forever. However, wrestling may well have perfected the style for entertainment purposes, which has in turn infiltrated nearly all aspects of modern life, not least of which are economics and politics. Thus, we have crypto- and fiat currencies based on nothing, where money can be materialized out of thin air to save itself from worthlessness, at least until that jig is up, too. We also have twin sham candidates for this fall’s U.S. presidential election, both clearly unfit for the job for different reasons. And in straightforward fictional entertainment, we have a strong revival of magical Medievalism, complete with mythical creatures, spells, and blades of fortune. As with economics and politics, we know it’s all a complex of brazen lies and gaslighting, but it’s nonetheless so tantalizing that its entertainment value outstrips and sidelines any calls to fidelity or integrity. Spectacle and fakery are frankly more interesting, more fun, more satisfying. Which brings me to my favorite Joe Bageant quote:

We have embraced the machinery of our undoing as recreation.

Stampede for the Exits

As we prepare to hunker down for the Long Emergency (using Kunstler’s apt term), there has been a veritable stampede for the exits, which takes multiple forms as the U.S. anticipates an exponential rise in the viral epidemic, roughly a week behind Italy’s example. It wouldn’t surprise me to see curfews and/or martial law enacted before long. But then, I’m an avowed doomer and have expected something wild and woolly to transpire for some years now. It was always futile to predict either what or when with any specificity. The number of possible scenarios is simply too great. But the inevitability of some major disruption was (to me at least) quite obvious. Whether the COVID-19 pandemic develops into a megadeath pulse remains to be seen. I cannot predict any better than most.

In the meantime, panic buying of toilet paper (an irrational essential I joked about here) and prophylactics such as surgical masks and alcohol swabs; widespread cancellation of concerts, sports events, school sessions, and church services; press releases by every public-facing corporate entity as to their hygienic response to the virus; crazy fluctuations in the U.S. and international stock markets; and exhortations to stay home if at all possible attest to the seriousness of the threat. The velocity of the stock market crash in particular points to a mad stampede to get out before being crushed. Our collective response seems to me exaggerated, but perhaps it’s necessary to forestall the worst-case scenario or letting things run rampant. It’s possible that quarantines and a major economic slowdown will do more damage than the virus, making the cure worse than the disease. That’s a hypothetical to which we will probably never know the answer with certainty, though the United Kingdom may be running that very experiment. Also, Guy McPherson suggests that a 20% reduction in industrial activity will be enough to trigger an abrupt rise in global average temperature further negatively affecting habitat. However, it’s a Catch-22 precisely because sustained industrial activity is already destroying habitat.

In nature, there are several familiar waves far too powerful to stop or control: earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. I suppose we should now acknowledge another: pandemic diseases. While it’s sensible to seek to understand what’s happening even as it happens, I can’t help but to wonder whether resistance is futile and letting the wave crash over us is roughly equivalent to before-the-fact mobilization. Pop psychology would have us do something, not nothing, as an antidote to despair, and indeed, abandoning people to their fates has a callous feel to it — the sort of instrumental logic characteristic of tyrants. I’m not recommending it. On the upside, after the initial panic at the sight of the approaching wave, and shortly after the wave hits, we humans demonstrate a remarkable capacity to set aside differences and pull together to offer aid and comfort. We rediscover our common humanity. Maybe Mad Max-style dystopias are just fiction.

Long Live the King

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new
cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

—Antonio Gramsci

 As a kid, I was confused when during some TV drama I heard the phrase “The king is dead; long live the king!” I was interpreting events too literally: the king had just died, so how could his subjects proclaim for him long life? Only when age awarded me greater sophistication (probably not wisdom, though) did I then realize that the phrase connotes the end of one era and the start of another. Old regent dies; new regent assumes power. We’re in the midst of such as transition from one era to the next, though it isn’t marked clearly by the death of a leader. Indeed, when I launched this blog in 2006, that was what I sensed and said so plainly in the About Brutus link at top, which hasn’t changed since then except to correct my embarrassing typos. I initially thought the transition would be about an emerging style of consciousness. Only slightly later, I fell down the rabbit hole regarding climate change (an anthropogenic, nonlinear, extinction-level process). I still believe my intuitions and/or conclusions on both subjects, but I’ve since realized that consciousness was always a moving target and climate change could unfold slowly enough to allow other fundamental shifts to occur alongside. No promises, though. We could also expire rather suddenly if things go awry quickly and unexpectedly. At this point, however, and in a pique of overconfidence, I’m willing to offer that another big transition has finally come into focus despite its being underway as I write. Let me explain. In his book America: The Farewell Tour (2018), Chris Hedges writes this:

Presently, 42 percent of the U.S. public believes in creationism … [and] nearly a third of the population, 94 million people, consider themselves evangelical. Those who remain in a reality-based universe do not take seriously the huge segment of the public, mostly white and working-class, who because of economic distress have primal yearnings for vengeance, new glory, and moral renewal and are easily seduced by magical thinking … The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and reason, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all the supports them. [pp. 50–51]

That’s where we are now, retreating into magical thinking we supposedly left behind in the wake of the Enlightenment. Call it the Counter-Enlightenment (or Un-Enlightenment). We’re on this track for a variety of reasons but primarily because the bounties of the closing Age of Abundance have been gobbled up by a few plutocrats. Most of the rest of population, formerly living frankly precarious lives (thus, the precariat), have now become decidedly unnecessary (thus, the unnecessariat). The masses know that they have been poorly served by their own social, political, and cultural institutions, which have been systematically hijacked and diverted into service of the obscenely, absurdly rich.

Three developments occurring right now, this week, indicate that we’re not just entering an era of magical thinking (and severely diminishing returns) but that we’ve lost our shit, gone off the deep end, and sought escape valves to release intolerable pressures. It’s the same madness of crowds writ large — something that periodically overtakes whole societies, as noted above by Chris Hedges. Those developments are (1) the U.S. stock market (and those worldwide?) seesawing wildly on every piece of news, (2) deranged political narratives and brazenly corrupt machinations that attempt to, among other things, install select the preferred Democratic presidential candidate to defeat 45, and (3) widespread panic over the Covid-19 virus. Disproportionate response to the virus is already shutting down entire cities and regions even though the growing epidemic so far in the U.S. has killed fewer people than, say, traffic accidents. Which will wreak the worst mayhem is a matter of pointless conjecture since the seriousness of the historical discontinuity will require hindsight to access. Meanwhile, the king is dead. Long live the king!

The Man Who Knew Too Little

That man is me. Thrice in the last month I’ve stumbled headlong into subjects where my ignorance left me grasping in the dark for a ledge or foothold lest I be swept into a maelstrom of confusion by someone’s claims. This sensation is not unfamiliar, but it’s usually easy to beat back. Whereas I possess multiple areas of expertise and as an autodidact am constantly absorbing information, I nonetheless recognize that even in areas where I consider myself qualified to act and/or opine confidently, others possess authority and expertise far greater than mine. Accordingly, I’ve always considered myself a generalist. (A jack of all trades is not quite the same thing IMO, but I decline to draw that distinction here.)

Decisions must inevitably be made on insufficient information. That’s true because more information can always be added on top, which leads to paralysis or infinite regress if one doesn’t simply draw an arbitrary line and stop dithering. This is also why I aver periodically that consciousness is based on sufficiency, meaning “good enough.” A paradox exists between a decision being good enough to proceed despite the obvious incompleteness of information that allows for full, balanced analysis, if fullness can even be achieved. Knowledge is thus sufficient and insufficient at the same time. Banal, everyday purchasing decisions at the grocery store are low risk. Accepting a job offer, moving to a new city, and proposing marriage carry significant risks but are still decisions made on insufficient information precisely because they’re prospective. No way of knowing with certainty how things will turn out.

Life Out of Balance, pt. 1

I was introduced to the phrase life out of balance decades ago when I saw the film Koyaanisqatsi. The film is the first of a trilogy (sequels are Powaqqatsi and Nagoyqatsi) by Godfrey Reggio, though the film is arguably more famous because of its soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. Consisting entirely of wordless montage and music, the film contrasts the majesty of nature (in slo-mo, among other camera effects) with the frenetic pace of human activity (often sped up) and the folly of the human-built world. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word, meaning life out of balance. One might pause to consider, “out of balance with what?” The film supplies the answer, none too subtly: out of balance with nature. The two sequels are celebrations of humans at work and technology, respectively, and never gained the iconic stature of the initial film.

If history (delivering us into the 21st century) has demonstrated anything, it’s that we humans are careening out of control toward disaster, not unlike the spacecraft in the final sequence of Koyaanisqatsi that tumbles out of the atmosphere for an agonizingly long time (in slo-mo), burning all the way down. We are all witness to the event (more accurately, the process) but can do little anymore to alter the eventual tragic result. Though some counsel taking steps toward amelioration (of suffering, if nothing else), our default response is rather to deny our collective fate, and worse, to accelerate toward it. That’s how unbalanced we are as a global civilization.

The observation that we are badly out of balance is made at the species and civilizational levels but is recapitulated at all levels of social organization, from distinct societies or nationalities to regional and municipal organizations and associations on down to families and individuals. The forces, dynamics, and power laws that push us off balance are many, but none is as egregious as the corrupting influence of interrelated wealth and power. Wisdom of the ancients (especially the non-Western ones) gave us the same verdict, though we have refused intransigently (or more charitably: failed) to learn the lesson for hundreds of generations.

What I propose to do in this multipart series is explore or survey some of the manifestations of life out of balance. There is no particular organization, chronology, or schedule for subsequent entries. As an armchair social critic, I reserve the luxury of exercising my own judgment and answering to no one. Stay tuned.

Matryoshkas

For want of a useful way to describe multiple, intersecting problems plaguing the modern world — a nest of problems, if you will — let me adopt matryoshkas (a/k/a Russian nesting dolls). The metaphor is admittedly imperfect because problems are not discrete, resized replicas of each other that nest snugly, one inside the next. Rather, a better depiction would look more like some crazy mash-up of a Venn diagram and a Rorschach test but without the clean dividing lines or symmetry.

I use matryoshkas because they bear close relationship to each other. Also, the matryoshka is a maternal figure, much like Mother Earth. Matryoshkas are interlocking, each affecting others, though their relationships beyond the metaphor are far too complex to manage or manipulate effectively. For instance, the expansionary (growth) economy matryoshka (the paradigmatic problem of our time), nested two or three levels inside the Mother Earth matryoshka, bursts the outer dolls from within, whereas the collapsing Mother Earth matryoshka crushes the inner dolls. Similarly, if the economy matryoshka contracts (as it should and must), other inner dolls (e.g., nation states) will not survive. Which matryoshka fits inside another is a matter of interpretation. The one representing human consciousness is especially hard to position because it’s both cause and effect.

The Global Climate Strike underway this week reminds us of the outermost matryoshka, the largest one that contains or encapsulates all the others. Dealing with this biggest problem (since it’s truly an extinction level event, though slow-acting due to its global scale) has been delayed so long that (to mix my metaphors) the patient has become terminal. The diagnosis came long ago (i.e., quit smoking, or more accurately, quit burning fossil fuels and heating the planet), but treatment (cessation, really) never happened. We just kept puffing away with our transportation infrastructure (cars, boats, trains, and planes) and industrial machinery (including weaponry) because to do otherwise would — gasp — imperil the economy or negatively impact what’s become a nonnegotiable lifestyle, at least in the First World and only for a diminishing portion. The implicit decision, I suppose, is to live large now but condemn those unfortunate enough to follow in the wake of global ecological destruction.

Unless I misjudge the mood and consensus, climate change is (finally!) no longer the subject of controversy or denial except by a few intransigent fools (including political leaders and news groups that have inexplicably instituted gag orders to conceal the staggering immensity of the problem). Enough nasty events (storms, species die-offs, and epidemics — though no pandemic just yet) have piled up, including by way of example “unprecedented” flooding in Houston (never mind that flooding is a regular occurrence now, establishing a new precedent from which we steadfastly refuse to learn), that it’s impossible to dispute that we’ve entered an era of rather extraordinary instability. (That last sentence has problems with nesting, too, which I could fix by rewriting the sentence, but perhaps it’s fitting to just let the problems fester.) Indeed, as I have indicated before, we’re transitioning out of the Garden Earth (having left behind Ice Age Earth some 12,000 years ago) to Hothouse Earth. The rate of change is quite unlike similar transitions in the geological past, and we’re quite unlikely to survive.